[OLPC library] working hard @ Boston's OLPC HQ--join the live chat--TOC review begins ASAP

[Chris Leonard]

On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 11:25 AM, Holt <holt at laptop.org> wrote:
> 1. Please all in the building, and remote contributors, remember to stay
> wired in on IRC channel #olpc-help right here, for late-breaking
> developments:
>
>    http://forum.laptop.org/chat
>
> 2. Christoph (who will be reviewing our proposed TOC starting in about
> 30min) asks that folks editing http://j.mp/xomanual include a comment
> whenever possible, before committing wiki edits -- makes it tons easier to
> review our progress in Wiki pages' history, thanks!
> And of course http://j.mp/xomanual is really:
>
>    http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Help_Activity_refresh
>


Just read through http://wiki.laptop.org/go/2012_Doc_Sprint_Planning_Chat

and I wanted to make a few comments.

I like the idea of using SVG to achieve the possibility of media i18n
and L10n very much, I look forward to seeing if Walter can quickly
hack up an SVG screen-shotter.  I must admit I have not extensively
explored itstool and SVG L10n in practice although in theory most of
the bits of the toolchain are there, I would be reluctant to lean on
it too heavily until it has been live-tested from start to finish.  I
completely agree that this is the future direction of media i18n/L10n,
it is just that I have not walked the complete path myself and I do
not know where the snags will be or what they will be.

Being conservative, I suspect that bitmap type (at least non-SVG)
screenshots will be part of the current round of published product.
In this circumstance, my recommendation is that the screenshots be
produced in parallel in English and Spanish (at least) to cover the
future of L10n (because English is the de facto bridging language for
L10n) and the largest single language audience of Sugar deployments
(Spanish-speaking South and Central America).

These parallel sets of images are perhaps most easily distinguished by
adopting a naming convention that includes an ISO-639 language code
suffix (e.g. Screenshot1-en.jpg and Screenshot1-es.jpg being the same
basic screenshot, one taken on a English XO, the other on a Spanish
XO).

Image repository concept

Given that the chapters or sections will be created on a Mediawiki
wiki instasnce (wiki.l.o or wiki.sl.o) the simplest image repository
is to just create an "image index" page on the wiki, upload the
images, and manually add a link to them on the index page.

The "image index" page could contain recommendations about image size
/ pixel counts, etc.  The index page could also theoretically serve as
a screenshot wiishlist that is filled in by the "image team'.

In this way, the uploaded images can be directly used in the wiki page
chapters you are creating in the normal wiki fashion (after all,
wiki's are designed with image content management and presentation in
mind) and a manually maintained image index page gives you another
useful way to focus on the image content (e.g. looking for
multilang-versions or keeping track of the progress of a proposed
"image team". )

Just some thoughts on image management and L10n for your
consideration.  Sorry I can't do more, but I'm swamped with L10n stuff
I need to catch up on.

cjl